The musical DNA of Sheffield run through this album, with its excursions across dystopian synth-rock.
DISCUS MUSIC 171CD
Adam Fairclough: drums; Adi Newton: voice; Andres Figueroa: flute, tenor sax: Beatrix Ward Fernandez: violin; Charlie Collins: percussion; Dave Kuratsu: harmonium, mellotron; David Lewin: guitars, keys, drums, synthesisers; David Was: voice; Dean Honer: synthesizer; Julia Calvo: vocals, voice; Karl D’Silva: guitar; Maarten Ornstein: bass clarinet; Martin Archer: saxello, tenor sax; Matt Bourne: electra-piano, piano; Michael Somerset: bass clarinet, clarinet, electronics, keys, voice, woodwinds, percussion; Pete Hope: vocals; Peter Fairclough: drums; Philippe Clegg: bass guitar; Rachel Edmonson: vocals, tenor sax, voice; Seth Bennett: bass; Stephen Mallinder: vocals; Sylwia Drwal; vocals; Tom Wax: guitar; Vina Figueroa: vocals
Not, of course, strictly a jazz album (although the presence of Matthew Bourne and Martin Archer, for instance, pushes it into jazzier realms) but one that it has been a joy to review. The musical DNA of Sheffield run through this album, with its excursions across dystopian synth-rock.
This isn’t surprising given that Mzylkypop is brought to us by Mike Somerset and Charlie Collins (ClockDVA), the incomparable Sylwia Anna Drwal (Mother of Crows, The Vagabonds) to sing most of the songs. The ‘Threnodies’ are a song cycle in which Drwal delivers a wide range of emotions that fully engage listeners and refuses to let release them until the last note has rung out.
The album closer, ‘My room’ (not part of this cycle) is bleakly despairing but life-affirming lyrics (and the ways that Blues tunes can be) presented in a musical setting that has the mournful air of a Chopin mazurka, delivered compellingly by Drwal.
The Ad hocs are, I guess, the pieces in which friends drop in to add their vocals to the other pieces. Stephen Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire) intones in his immediately recognisable way some deeply unsettling lyrics (announcing the end of the world) over a bassline that recalls 1980’s clubs.
David Was, reading the lyrics of ‘Trophy Wives’, has great fun with disturbing lines that (amongst other things) seems to deconstruct the canard of forcible deportation as the desperate stupidity of a gormless government and its xenophobic lackeys (“Take em back on the plane to the Serengeti Plain.. in a freezer bag ”. But the music is not simply agit-pop against the state-of-the-nation or despair at the end of the world.
This picks up on themes from the dystopia that underpinned 2018’s Kiedy Wilki Zawyja?” (“When Will The Wolves Howl?”) which also featured many of the same musicians as this album. On this outing, there are also excursions into Satanism or witchcraft and atheism, which one interprets as joyfully provocative (particularly in the ways that the musicians respond to the themes).
